The “Soil Genetic Erosion”: a new threat for soils?

Abstract

During the 1990’s the concept of pedodiversity started to be diffused in the scientific literature and the decrement of the soil diversity in space and time - particularly due to human activity - has been seen as a sort of underhand problem affecting soil ecosystems, considering that different soil types face gradual or drastic reduction or complete loss of their unique “genetic features”. Pedodiversity has received considerable recent interest, especially as peculiar aspect of biodiversity and has been assessed by several authors by applying diversity indices used in ecology. This paper takes into consideration the influence of human activities on the loss of pedodiversity in a Mediterranean area due to large scale farming. In particular it examines the quantitative and qualitative soil changes in a period of 53 years evaluating the loss of soil diversity at soil subgroups level of the USDA Soil Taxonomy system.